Ubuntu 16.10 - Not bad, but not worth to update if you are happy with 16.04

The hecticgeek portal has published a review of recently released Ubuntu 16.10, a regular 6 monthly release of Ubuntu supported for 9 months. The review remarks, though Ubuntu 16.10 is not a bad release, there is no much reason to update your system if you are happy with existing 16.04 LTS release which will be supported up to 5 years.

When a project ships a release in every 6 months, we can not expect much new features from it, other than some updated packages and critical bug fixes. Same is the case with Ubuntu 16.10. Ubuntu 16.10 is coming with Unity 7.5, a maintenance release of Unity 7.x shipped with 16.04. So, the end users can not observe any significant changes between the releases. However, behind the hood, Ubuntu 16.10 is using GNOME components 3.20.x which is an updated version against 3.18.x series used in Ubuntu 16.04.

Ubuntu 16.10 is lagging behind Ubuntu 16.04 in terms of boot time, shutdown delay and memory usage. However, Ubuntu 16.10 has improved power consumption comparing to 16.04 LTS. Considering all these aspects, reviewer advices to stick with 16.04 release as 16.10 release does not provide much reasons to update.

When you release a new version of your operating system within every 6 months, usually there isn’t a lot of room for adding major changes. And that is the case with many GNU/Linux
distributions these days, and Ubuntu 16.10 release is no exception.
Since Unity is based on the user application set provided by GNOME
desktop environment, according to the release notes, the underlying
GNOME user applications have been upgraded to the version 3.20 at least
(which is the case with the file manager -- ‘files’, for instance) and
some others have been upgraded to the version 3.22 which is the latest
release of GNOME currently.

LibreOffice has been updated to the version 5.2 (now uses GTK3
menu-bars), Kernel version is 4.8, X.org version is 1.18.4 and now
systemd (a core utility that is in control of system services and
processes that run from the background) is used for the user session
(‘user session’ is what takes place after the login manager, in very
simple terms) as well. The ISO disc image is about 1.6 GB in size which
has grown by around 100 MB more, compared to the previous Ubuntu 16.04
LTS release.